A Thousand Days

by Arthur M. Schlesinger

  5. COUNTER-INSURGENCY

  One quick effect of the Laos crisis was to lead the President to take up an old preoccupation from Senate days, now made more urgent by Khrushchev’s January speech—the problem of countering guerrilla attack. If what he liked to call “the subterranean war” were to be the major form of communist aggression so long as the United States retained nuclear supremacy, then the Army must learn how to meet the guerrilla threat. The Philippines, Malaya and Greece showed that guerrilla warfare could be stopped, but not by close-order drill. In the next weeks and months he made anti-guerrilla instruction a personal project. Indeed, it required presidential backing; for the Army had fallen into the hands of ‘organization generals’ after the departure of Ridgway, Taylor and Gavin who looked on the counter-insurgency business as a faddish distraction from the main responsibility of training for conventional assault. The professionals, infatuated with the newest technology and eager to strike major blows, deeply disliked the thought of reversion to the rude weapons, amateur tactics, hard life and marginal effects of guerrilla warfare.

  Guerrillas were also an old preoccupation of Walt Rostow’s. When Kennedy read Lansdale’s report about guerrilla success in Vietnam, he asked Rostow to check into what the Army was, in fact, doing about counterguerrilla training. He was soon informed that the Special Forces at Fort Bragg consisted of fewer than a thousand men. Looking at the field manuals and training literature, he tossed them aside as “meager” and inadequate. Reading Mao Tse-tung and Che Guevara himself on the subject, he told the Army to do likewise. (He used to entertain his wife on country weekends by inventing aphorisms in the manner of Mao’s “Guerrillas must move among the people as fish swim in the sea.”) He asked General Clifton, his military aide, to bring in the Army’s standard anti-guerrilla equipment, examined it with sorrow and ordered Army research and development to do better. Most important of all, he instructed the Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg to expand its mission, which had hitherto been largely the training of cadres for action behind the lines in case of a third world war, in order to confront the existing challenge of guerrilla warfare in the jungles and hills of underdeveloped countries. Over the opposition of the Army bureaucracy, which abhorred separate elite commands on principle, he reinstated the SF green beret as the symbol of the new force.

  With the President’s detailed support, Major General William P. Yarborough made the Special Warfare Center into a vigorous and ingenious seminary in the new methods. Other centers were set up in Panama, Okinawa, Vietnam and West Germany. In Washington, Robert Kennedy, Maxwell Taylor and Richard Bissell pushed the cause. Roger Hilsman, drawing on his wartime experience in the hills of Burma, and Walt Rostow, analyzing the guerrilla problem as part of the pathology of economic development, carried the gospel to the State Department. Eventually Foreign Service officers were even put through courses, sometimes of dubious value, in counter-insurgency methods. By the autumn of 1961 a Counter-Insurgency Committee under General Taylor set itself to developing the nation’s capability for unconventional warfare.

  There was, to be sure, a faddish aspect to this enthusiasm. Some of its advocates acted as if the delicate arts of blacking one’s face and catching sentries by the throat in the night could by themselves eliminate the guerrilla threat. The President was under no such illusion. He insisted that the Special Forces be schooled in sanitation, teaching, bridge-building, medical care and the need for economic progress. I do not think he ever forgot Mao’s warning that guerrilla action must fail “if its political objectives do not coincide with the aspirations of the people and their sympathy, cooperation and assistance cannot be gained.” The problem of applying this maxim to Southeast Asia never ceased to trouble him.

  XIV

  Encounter in Europe

  “THE ONLY THING that really surprised us when we got into office,” the President said late in May at a Democratic Party dinner in honor of his forty-fourth birthday, “was that things were just as bad as we had been saying they were; otherwise we have been enjoying it very much.” The fragrant spring of 1961 found him, in spite of the trials of the first winter, in a cheerful mood. He had survived the crises of Cuba and of Laos. He had begun a reorganization of government which would enable him to meet crisis better in the future. He had watched Captain Alan Shepard improve the American position in space by rocketing 115 miles into the upper atmosphere. He was planning a trip to France to see General de Gaulle. And on May 12, he had received an unexpected reply from N. S. Khrushchev to his letter of February 22, reopening the question, presumed dead after the Bay of Pigs, of a meeting in Vienna in early June.

  One event marred his buoyancy. In mid-May he went to Canada to return the visit that Prime Minister John Diefenbaker had paid him in Washington in February. The earlier meeting had not proved a success. Diefenbaker, who felt at home with Eisenhower, had been uneasy with the new President. Kennedy thought the Canadian insincere and did not like or trust him. The round of talks in Ottawa was civil enough, though a confidential memorandum from Walt Rostow to the President setting forth our objectives at the meeting somehow fell into Canadian hands and caused trouble later. At one point the President took part in a tree-planting ceremony in front of Government House. Forgetting to bend his knees and keep the shovel close to his body, he stood erect, held the shovel at arm’s length and turned a few spadefuls of soil. A premonitory twinge deepened after a few hours into an acute and nagging ache. He had wrenched his back, severely straining the muscles so carefully restored in the years since he had first gone to Dr. Travell. The pain did not leave him for more than six months, and in the weeks of travel immediately ahead it was often sharp and exhausting.

  1. BACKGROUND IN BERLIN

  What had led Khruschev to renew the idea of a meeting with Kennedy? His letter, though noting his objections to the Bay of Pigs, reciprocated Kennedy’s February hope for better relations and named Laos, disarmament and Germany as leading topics for an exchange of views. No doubt, like Kennedy, Khrushchev was curious about his adversary and eager to take his measure. No doubt too the Bay of Pigs had left him with an impression of the American President as an irresolute young man, incapable of the sort of drastic action Khrushchev himself had undertaken in Hungary; if this were so, then the Russian leader might hope to bully him in direct encounter as he had bullied so many other heads of state. More specifically, the occasion would give him a chance to resume the campaign, begun by Stalin thirteen years before, to drive the west out of Berlin.

  For Khrushchev, the German question had become increasingly exasperating. In his speech of January 6, he had declared the allied position “especially vulnerable” in West Berlin, adding ominously that, if the democracies did not come to their senses and make the required adjustments, the Soviet Union would sign a peace treaty with the communist state of East Germany—an act which, in Khrushchev’s view, would terminate the legal basis for the western presence in Berlin. That basis rested on the wartime agreements which divided Germany into four zones and established four-power control of the German capital. In 1945 these arrangements were intended only to tide things over until the wartime allies negotiated a final peace settlement with a post-Hitler German regime. But, as that hope perished with the spread of the cold war, the democratic allies and the Soviet Union began to convert their zones into separate German states—the Federal Republic in the west and the so-called Democratic Republic in the east. Only Berlin itself, though split into west and east sectors, retained four-power status. Situated in the midst of the Soviet zone, West Berlin, with its independent administration and its allied garrison, was now the last democratic outpost on the communist side of the Iron Curtain.

  From an early point the Soviet Union had regarded the western presence in Berlin as intolerable. In 1948 Stalin tried to force the allies out, but his blockade succeeded only in producing the great western airlift in response. Moscow knew that it could not raise the bidding to military action without risking atomic war; and, after 321
days of stalemate, Stalin, who had no atomic bombs, accepted defeat. For the next nine years West and East Berlin went their separate ways. In these years, however, the Russians acquired the bomb themselves and thereby lowered the probability of a western nuclear response. This gave Khrushchev freedom for maneuver; and in the late fifties he began to mount a new world offensive. To immobilize the west he encouraged ban-the-bomb movements and avowed his passion for peaceful coexistence; to spread communism he utilized local subversion, wars of national liberation and the threat of nuclear war. Like his predecessor, he found the western presence in Berlin particularly objectionable; with the communist penchant for medical metaphor, Khrushchev described West Berlin, according to mood, as a bone in the throat or a cancerous tumor. A few months after the first sputnik sailed through the skies, he took advantage of the changing balance of nuclear force to resume Stalin’s 1948 campaign. This culminated in November 1958 in demands that the allied occupation end and West Berlin be made a demilitarized ‘free city.’ If the west did not accept the Soviet plan within six months, Khrushchev said, Russia would sign its own peace treaty with the Democratic Republic.

  A number of motives evidently lay behind Khrushchev’s action. Europe constituted the single anomaly in the picture which gave the Soviet leaders such satisfaction everywhere else they looked. In Asia, in Africa, in Latin America, in industrial growth, in space, communism was on the offensive. But in Europe communism had been in retreat ever since the late forties—from the time of the Marshall Plan and the organization of NATO. Not only had Western Europe recovered its economic and political vitality, but communist Eastern Europe had been shaken recurrently by revolts against Moscow—Yugoslavia in 1948, East Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956. At the very least, Berlin offered the opportunity to consolidate the communist position in East Germany and legitimatize the existing territorial division of Europe. If Khrushchev could force the west to grant East Germany legal recognition, he would not only secure the status quo throughout Eastern Europe but would demoralize the West German government in Bonn, disrupt NATO, stop the momentum of western unification and regain the European offensive. And, if he attained his maximum objective and drove the allies out of Berlin, he would subject the west to a humiliation which would weaken it all around the globe and complete the alteration of the world balance of power.

  The western leaders for their part found the ‘free city’ proposal unacceptable. It applied, of course, only to West Berlin; and it would have meant the introduction of Soviet troops into the noncommunist part of the city, as well as the prohibition there of what Khrushchev called “hostile subversive activity”—i.e., criticism of communism. Its practical effect would have been to place West Berlin at the mercy of East Germany and the Soviet Union. When Khrushchev made his American trip in 1959, Eisenhower therefore avoided the ‘free city’ idea. But he did accept the Soviet description of the Berlin situation as “abnormal” (as indeed it was, though it was not discreet to say so); and his administration soon laid certain concessions on the negotiating table, including limitations on the size of the western garrison as well as on democratic propaganda and intelligence activities. Khrushchev meanwhile postponed his six-month deadline.

  Some Democrats, like Stevenson and Harriman, were prepared to trade legal points for definitive guarantees of Allied presence and access. Others, like Acheson, regarded all concessions as dangerous. Berlin, Acheson wrote early in 1959, might offer “the hardest test of the West’s will and determination since June 1950, when the Communists attacked in Korea.” As a Senator, Kennedy had repeatedly emphasized the gravity of the stakes in Berlin. In July 1960 he predicted on Meet the Press that by the next January or February Khrushchev would “face the next President of the United States with a very difficult decision, perhaps even an ultimatum on Berlin.” He added: “We should make it very clear that we are not going to concede our position on Berlin, that we are going to meet our commitment to defend the liberty of the people of West Berlin, and that if Mr. Khrushchev pushes it to the ultimate, we are prepared to meet our obligation.”

  In the months after the U-2 incident and the collapse of the Paris summit, the Berlin problem seemed to subside. As late as the end of March 1961, a Moscow meeting of the Warsaw Pact countries adjourned without mention of Berlin. But there were portents: first, Khrushchev’s menacing remark in his January 6 speech; then his subsequent statements to Ambassador Thompson that he had made commitments about Berlin, his prestige was engaged and he had waited long enough.

  It is evident that by 1961 local considerations in East Germany were giving Khrushchev an almost desperate feeling that he had to do something. He was, or claimed to be, afraid that West Germany was about to acquire nuclear weapons; and, as he told Walter Lippmann in the spring, he wanted to fix the status of Berlin and the two Germanys before Bonn, emboldened by possession of the bomb, could take advantage of the unsettled demarcation line to move against East Germany. Even worse was the rising stream of refugees fleeing from East Germany, now on the order of four thousand a week. The contrast between the glum and tacky despotism of East Berlin and the exuberant prosperity of West Berlin, with its gleaming new buildings, blazing lights and spirited intellectual life, was too much; and the resulting exodus not only made propaganda about the superiority of communism look foolish but was fast draining East Germany of the professionals and technicians so vital to its future. Indeed, the total population of East Germany declined by nearly two million between 1949 and mid-1961. If Khrushchev now moved against West Berlin, he could still hope to inflict a world-wide political and moral defeat on the democracies, and, even if he did not do this, he could at least stop the flight to the west and stabilize the territorial status quo in Europe.

  He may conceivably too have had some genuine fears about the new American administration. Kennedy himself, with characteristic detachment, used to wonder later what had gone wrong in the spring of 1961. He thought at times that the March and May messages calling for an increased American defense effort might have sounded too threatening. It is possible that the acceleration of the Minuteman and Polaris programs had unintended effects in Moscow and that, as Kuznetsov had warned Wiesner and Rostow at the Pugwash meeting, the Soviet leaders now saw no choice but to match the American build-up. In addition, Harriman in his March debut as roving ambassador had said that “all discussions in Berlin must begin from the start.” This was a move to disengage Kennedy from the concessions the Eisenhower administration had made in 1959 and even more from the ones we had been informed Eisenhower was ready to make at the 1960 summit meeting in Paris; but Moscow no doubt read it as a hardening of American policy. Yet at the same time the Soviet signals were not, seen from Washington, very encouraging. Khrushchev’s truculent speech of January preceded Kennedy’s defense messages by many weeks; and his decision to move against West Berlin had ample explanation in his own problems and ambitions.

  As for the President, he saw no sense in meeting Khrushchev unless something of substance was likely to result. When the Attorney General made this point to the Soviet Ambassador, he was given to understand that progress was entirely conceivable on Laos and on the test ban. Beyond these specific problems, the President was attracted by the meeting as offering an opportunity to define the framework for future American-Soviet relations. Kennedy saw the world as in a state of uncontrollable change, rushing in directions no one could foresee. The equilibrium of force, he believed, was now roughly in balance between the United States and the Soviet Union—if not in the sense of numerical parity, at least in the sense that neither could hope to destroy the other and emerge unscathed; and the overriding need, he felt, was to prevent direct confrontations between Russian and American power in the chaotic time ahead. He intended to propose, in effect, a standstill in the cold war so that neither great nuclear state, in the inevitable competition around the planet, would find itself committed to actions which would risk its essential security, threaten the existing balance of force or endanger wo
rld peace. In particular, if, as Ambassador Thompson’s dispatches forecast, Khrushchev meant to get tough over Berlin, Kennedy wished to make clear, in a favorite Washington phrase that spring, that Khrushchev must not crowd him too much.

  With such thoughts in mind, Kennedy prepared to leave for Europe. Jacqueline was to come with him. She still had not altogether recovered from John’s birth, but a week in the country at the end of May enabled her to sleep and build strength. When Nicole Alphand, the wife of the French ambassador to Washington, asked her whether there was anything special she wanted to do in Paris, she said only that she hoped to meet André Malraux. The President engaged in a quick round of speeches before their departure. “I go to see Mr. Khrushchev in Vienna,” he said in Boston on May 29. “I go as the leader of the greatest revolutionary country on earth.” Some people regard the United States as “a fixed society,” but “that is not my view.” On May 30 he lightly told a dinner of the Eleanor Roosevelt Cancer Foundation in New York, “It is now one-thirty in Paris, and I am due there at ten-thirty, and I do not believe it would be a good start to keep the General waiting.”

  2. INTERLUDE IN PARIS

  The General did not have to wait. He met the Kennedys at Orly and escorted them to their apartments at the Quai d’Orsay. Parisians lined the streets to admire the young couple and cheer the motorcade. As the presidential car moved through the Latin Quarter, American students enthusiastically waved a Harvard banner. On arrival Kennedy took a steaming bath to ease the pain of his back. Then he was almost immediately on his way again for his opening talk with the General.